On the morning of November 15, 55,000 postal workers—members of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW)— walked off the job. It’s the latest in a series of large-scale public sector strikes that have been rocking the country since inflation heated up a few years ago, as workers aim to make up lost purchasing power.
What exactly is this strike about, anyways? What are workers asking for, and what is the crown corporation trying to do at the negotiating table?
There’s actually a lot at stake with this round of negotiations—the future of the public service may be on the table.
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Financial crisis at the post office
Canada Post is a crown corporation owned by the federal government, but it does not receive any taxpayer funding. It must make its own income and support its own operations as a financially independent public entity.
The past 10 years or so have been rough on its finances. Canada Post has lost a total of around $3 billion since 2016, eating into its cash reserves and creating a “significant threat” to the organization’s “long-standing role as a vital, publicly owned national infrastructure for Canadians,” according to its latest annual statement.
The corporation’s financial crisis is the result of a number of factors. Letter mail—the original mission of the post office—has been in steep decline for nearly two decades, largely due to the internet. Canada Post has a legal mission for—and monopoly over—letter mail delivery, in Canada, and is the only organization with the capacity to service the remote areas of the country. These areas, unlike urban centres, are not profitable—but Canada Post is a public service, not a for-profit corporation, and has a legal mission to service them anyway.
Parcel deliveries, though, have seen dramatic increases in volume over the same period, and will likely continue to expand in the years to come as online shopping becomes more and more important. Unlike letter mail, though, Canada Post does not have a monopoly over parcel delivery—and a slew of subcontracted operators have moved into the parcel industry in recent years.
Most of these companies operate on something like the Amazon model—forcing workers to work long and grinding hours on unpredictable schedules, having workers use their own cars for deliveries (and assuming no responsibility for repairs), generally providing no health or retirement benefits, and paying wages below the poverty line.
Because of their extremely exploitative business model, these companies are highly profitable. They also have no requirement to provide service to remote areas, unlike Canada Post, so they can operate exclusively in high-profit urban areas—eating into Canada Post’s market share—while leaving the costly rural zones to be covered by the crown corporation.
This situation has created something of a perfect storm for the organization’s finances. “Without additional borrowing and refinancing,” reads the 2023 annual report, “we expect to fall below our required operating and reserve cash requirements by early 2025.”
In this context, the employer and the workers went to the negotiating table to hammer out a new collective agreement. It’s a high-stakes competition between two visions of how to bring the post office out of crisis.
Fighting “gigification” and expanding the mission of the post office
One vision of how to do so—advanced on the employer side of the negotiating table—is to cut costs and make the crown corporation operate more like its gig economy competitors.
Management negotiators are proposing a number of changes to working conditions to make the workforce more “flexible,” including opening up parcel delivery on weekends and hiring workers on a “part-time flex” basis to do so. These workers would, according to the proposal, be scheduled to work for three to four hours at a time, but could be forced to stay on for eight-hour shifts if the workload justified it, CUPW negotiator Jim Gallant told The Monitor. Gallant also said that the crown corporation was asking for some workers to specifically be hired to work Saturdays, and Saturdays only, rather than also being able to work full-time hours if they wanted.
Postal workers are calling it “gigification,” or the slow transition of postal jobs from good, stable career jobs—ones with job security, which you can raise a family with, with decent and safe working conditions—to the grueling and exploitative conditions of Uber-ized contracting companies.
Management negotiators, Gallant says, are also proposing a number of serious cost-cutting rollbacks in workers’ pensions—instituting a two-tier pension system, so new hires would see significantly reduced retirement packages. They’re also proposing to institute a three-tier system for health benefits, which would dramatically increase premiums that workers pay to access their health benefits. If a staff person has a pre-existing condition, Gallant says, the proposal would have their premiums skyrocket.
Like most workers—especially in the public sector—Canada Post staff have seen significant losses in purchasing power over the past few years due to inflation, and are seeking to make up for lost ground. Those types of wage demands have been an important driver of the big increase in work stoppages in the past two years, and postal workers are no exception. Wage demands are an important driver of the strike.
But the workers want more than wages. They’re also demanding improved health benefits, including a relatively groundbreaking inclusion of gender-affirming care in the benefits package—something that remains rare in most workplace coverage. They’re also trying to strengthen protections against contracting out work to subcontractors, and improving protections for workers when technological changes improve efficiency so that workers can share in those benefits.
And the union has its own answer for how to fix Canada Post’s woes as an organization—outlined in a policy document called Delivering Community Power, which presents a sweeping vision of a post office that acts as a community hub for social services and green jobs. While it’s a long-term vision—not a suite of demands for this round of negotiations—the document provides some insight into the union’s vision for how to keep the post office alive.
One of the core elements of the Delivering Community Power plan is postal banking—having the crown corporation provide not-for-profit financial services, particularly in underserved communities, as a way to expand its social mission and gain new revenue streams. Postal banks exist in many countries worldwide, from Brazil to Switzerland, and service over a billion people. Canada had its own postal bank until 1969.
When CUPW extended its previous collective agreement in 2021, it did so on the condition that Canada Post begin a pilot project for postal banking. Rather than seeing the creation of a public postal bank, this project saw certain post office locations work in collaboration with TD bank to offer loans of up to $30,000.
The pilot project lasted a year, and, the union says, had positive feedback. Canada Post rolled out the TD-affiliated program nationwide in October 2022, but canceled it after just one month. The union says that it’s further evidence of the need for a fully public option, not one reliant on one of Canada’s big banks—and is looking to secure some commitments to that effect in this round of negotiations.
The rest of the Delivering Community Power program would also see Canada Post take on a more assertive role in things like food delivery, electric vehicle charging infrastructure, and even take on a role in rolling out high-speed internet to underserved areas. It would also allow seniors to opt in to a check-in program, where delivery workers would check in with elderly people on their route—allowing seniors to stay at home longer. Similar programs exist in Japan and France.
It’s a vision of Canada Post that would see the organization become a more active provider of a range of services, not just letter carriers, but as one of the drivers of expanded public services with good, stable jobs. On the other side of the negotiating table, a vision of Canada Post where the crown corp looks more like Amazon—a lean, profit-hungry operation that works its staff to the bone.
The current model of Canada Post seems, increasingly, to be on its way out. But which vision of a transformed post office—or, the third option of institutional failure—will come to replace it? That’s the question guiding workers as they walk picket lines across the country.
